I’m from Seattle, where we get our fair share of rain. I adore the rain, I love it when it’s cold and grey outside. However, rainy season in South America is so feo (ugly) that it’s making me reconsider my love affair with rain.
Ever since I got back to my site, it’s been raining for what seems like nearly 24-hours a day. Every day this week, it has rained probably 16 out of every 24 hours. I saw the sun for approximately 3 hours yesterday. Last night, it rained all through the night and when I got up this morning? It was raining again, and so foggy (neblina) I couldn’t see across the town square.
While it may be rainy in the Pacific Northwest, at least it’s a drizzle most of the time. In Ecuador, the rain does not fool around. We’re talking the type of downpour that leaves you soaking wet in a matter of seconds, despite my “waterproof” shell. Rain so long and hard that you lie in bed at night wondering if it will ever stop because surely the rest of the earth is running out of water?
This weather bums me out. It’s cold and wet, I can’t go running, my apartment is leaking (see photos), and I have a hard time dragging myself out of bed in the mornings. Not to mention the havoc that constant moisture wreaks on fabric – nothing dries completely and many of the clothes that I left when I went to the States smell like mildew. Lovely.
I am scared to go out the communities where we work, because last time I checked, dirt roads don’t stand up too well to a torrential downpour. The part that kills me is that this is planting time for the campesinos. While we are shivering and hiding out in our houses here in town, farmers are outside in the rain, planting their crops! I can’t even imagine…perhaps this is why they say that, “la vida en el campo es dura¨(life in the countryside is difficult). Good thing rainy season only lasts…until April.
